One thing i'm a big fan of is the 'eta till the eta'. So many developers/managers often shoot from the hip with estimates - usually with the rationale that if

One thing i'm a big fan of is the 'eta till the eta'. So many developers/managers often shoot from the hip with estimates - usually with the rationale that if it's all made up anyway might as well seem smart. Yet if you spend just like 20 minutes to try and break down the tasks and do some research you can usually reduce the margin of error significantly. Our brains are good at ignoring complexity and our egos are good at telling ourselves we understand things we don't. Break it down and do you research. Stuff like poking through github repos of libraries you might be adopting. Lots of forks? lacking documentation/tests? What kinds of issues? Who is using it and why? You still can certainly still run into unexpected complexity but you get good at recognizing where it's likely to pop up. It's hard, and you won't get it right always, but it doesn't mean that shit is 'impossible'.